After getting everything to work on my Desktop with Windows Vista, I decided to install Vista on my notebook too. I own a Acer Extensa 2902, which is nothing else than the Travelmate 292 Lmi-M11. With a Pentium M Centrino 1,4 Ghz, 1 GB Ram, 80 GB hard disk and a Mobility Radeon 9700 with 64MB, it still meets the minimum requirements for Vista new Look’n'Feel, Aero Glass. It’s one of the major reasons why I installed Vista. I just can’t take that ugly look of XP. Of course there are other reasons, but a nice design lets you work much more comfortable. Vista will probably rob the gamebility of my Notebook. I don’t think that it’ll be even close for running Vista and a 3D accelerated game at the same time. Well, after having a working set of CD for installation, it actually only took me two tries to install it. Quite amazing compared to my Desktop try. So next were the drivers again. Luckily, the only things missing were my network printer and Bluetooth. The network printer worked perfectly using the workaround I wrote about but Bluetooth was not working. I need BlueSoleil, but the Vista-Version 3.0 is still not finished. Too bad, but I didn’t need it anyway. So now I came across the next problem: Roaming profiles under Vista with Windows 2003 Small Business Server.

I already had a profile from XP, but because Vista has a lot of custom system folders now (documents, links, favorites, contacts, etc.), not all path would be matched correctly. Changing everything manually would probably take up more time than I’d need to create a new profile. So I did, hoping everything would work just as I wanted. But it didn’t. Nothing really worked the way I wanted. Vista’s roaming profiles weren’t synced all the time but when you log off. Unlike XP, where the complete profile folder was offline accessible, Vista made those local. This improves the performance a lot. I played around with roaming profiles for a few days and found myself a solution. First, I turned of all group policies for forwarding “My Documents”, “My Music”, etc. Next I set my roaming profile location to the parent folder of where “My Documents” used to be (\\Server\Users\Qian Qin in my case). I logged myself onto this account from my Notebook. This creates the roaming profile directory with correct rights. Now I manually set the profile from roaming to local. If you don’t, you may get into trouble when you log in on a different computer. I had problems with Outlook because the outlook.ost was saved on different locations on each computer. Next, I mapped a network drive to the roaming file location (Q: to \\Server\Users\Qian Qin) andd changed all paths of the custom system folders to Q: (in my case C:\Users\Qian Qin\Documents to Q:\Documents). The good thing about this is that you can map Pictures to a public location where you and maybe your family can all access. I use it for my photos, which are all on my server. After doing this I set everything to offline available. If you don’t Explorer will lag as hell once disconnected. I had to exprience that because I didn’t want to carry around my public pictures folder with my notebook. It’s simply too big and will need way to long to synchronize. The solution is simple. Create a folder like “dump” in it and make it offline available. It’s empty but will let Explorer see the Pictures folder offline available and cure the lag. If this is not an option for you, try making “desktop.ini” offline available. I did both of them to ensure the correct icon to be displayed even when it’s offline and to be able to store files in them (dump files in the dump folder). Now it looks like everything is just fine.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, the 20th February 2007 at 12:24 AM and is filed under: computer, software You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.